A Green Christmas

Christmas rituals

Every year, my husband and I hold our Christmas rituals dear. Decking the living room with lit garlands, decking the porch as well, setting out the creche that I grew up with, playing Christmas songs, editing the next Christmas romance, watching Christmas movies, turning on the Christmas tree.¹

The one ritual we’re missing

It hasn’t snowed appreciably here in northwest Missouri, and this means we haven’t celebrated one of our yearly rituals. For 35 years (give or take a few), I have celebrated the first snow. There has been no snow this year, and no snow in the forseeable forecast.

Whether alone or with friends, I have performed the ritual of First Snow:

Wait till at least one inch of fresh snow has fallen and it’s night out
Gather a bowl full of snow (or, alternatively, sit out in the snow)²
Grab a cup of preferred beverage³
Drink toasts to various things as your imagination grabs you⁴
Pass the cup around (pre-COVID)⁵
Always begin and end with “To the Snow”
When done, dump the last bit of the cup into the snow

First Snow, by its climatological nature, is impromptu. Generally, there’s not more than a few hours of warning. This has meant that anywhere from one (myself) to eight (friends) have met up for it.

But, as far as I know, it’s not happening this year according to the weather forecast. I guess I will have to enjoy my green Christmas

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The Christmas tree hides in the parlor. We literally just turn the lights on in the Christmas season. During the worst of COVID, we turned the lights back on all summer.
When I was younger, I sat out in the snow. Not anymore.
This beverage has ranged from blackberry brandy drunk out of a mug in a city park to hot chocolate with brandy on my balcony to plain hot chocolate in my living room.
The later in the round of toasts it is, the stranger and funnier the toasts grow. Especially if the contents of the cup are high-proof. For examples of toasts, click here.
Under COVID, it’s just me and my husband.

The Power of Small Rituals

Sunday morning, and our Sunday ritual once again — classical music and coffee. No newspaper, although we pull up the news on the Internet. Two of our cats linger downstairs — the big Chuckie with the tiny meow, and the loud and insistent calico Girly-Girl. Me-Me and Chloe the kitten are scrapping it out upstairs.

We don’t play anything but classical music till afternoon, and then we’re likely to play jazz. (Except today, when we will break the “no carols till Thanksgiving rule and play my playlist for Kringle in the Night through for tweaks.)

Meanwhile, the scent in the room is Silver Birch, a very autumnal scent. Outside, there’s one maple tree with leaves starting to turn red to remind us that the seasons do pass even when we’re too busy to look.

I’m thinking about my ritual to commemorate my book being published. I have a Moonman C1 Christmas Edition fountain pen coming in the mail, hopefully before the first of November. I will fill it with red ink and use it for Christmas things.

Rituals, as I have said before, are important. They help mark the seasons, the days, the milestones. They help commemorate the everyday and the phenomenal. They help with closure and with focus, with devotion and with loss. Don’t ignore the power of small rituals.

Milestones, Rituals, and a Vague Dissatisfaction

I believe it’s important to have rituals to celebrate and commemorate one’s big accomplishments. Graduation, birthdays, marriage, childbirth*, and other milestones have their parties, their recognition from the community that something important has happened.

That being said, I don’t know what I will do to recognize my accomplishment of self-publishing this novel. I swore to myself that I would have a book party (the real name escapes me) but that was before COVID — I wouldn’t chance a gathering now because people I love are at high risk.

I used Canva to make an advertising poster and print it in 12×16, and it’s now framed and looking for a home. That seems terribly symbolic of my feelings right now. I don’t want to get to publication day and say “That’s nice, now what?” I need to find that ritual so self-publishing feels like the accomplishment it is.

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* Just don’t get me started on gender reveals, because gender is complicated and messy.

Lost Rituals

It’s Saturday, and most of the snow has melted. The apple blossoms, however, are not coming back, so there will be no apples this year. It’s symbolic, I think, for all the rituals of American life which will be put on hold this year because of the coronavirus — graduation ceremonies, weddings, birthday parties. Burials go on, but funerals do not.

I worry about not having these rituals, especially the rituals of transition like college and high school graduations. Without these types of rituals, we feel rudderless, out of sorts. We need a recognition of what we’ve accomplished and where we’re going.

At the college, our students won’t go through graduation until fall, if we are even out of shelter-in-place by then. Our retiring faculty and staff will get no parties.

I suspect that our changed situation will be temporary, but that temporary could be as long as a year and a half. A cohort of people will not have their rituals to cling to, will feel rudderless, bereft. And although it is a small pain compared to the real possibilities of losing a family member, I will still mourn it with you.

The Rituals of a New Year

Tomorrow is the first day of my 25th fall semester as a professor.

I could say it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, but I’ve been doing this long enough that I don’t remember not going through the rituals of the beginning of the semester — writing syllabi, preparing course sites, figuring out what I need to say on the first day of the semester to keep from sounding like an idiot.

I don’t remember a fall semester where I haven’t had the nightmares born of the fear that things will not go well on the first day — the A/V equipment fails, the classroom is made up of walls and nooks such that some of the students can’t see or hear the lecture, I’m late for class, the students get frustrated and leave, I’m standing in front of the class in my underwear … dealing with the fear spawns its own ritual, that of re-preparing in the last minute so that nothing goes wrong.

What I wear to my first day of classes each year is its own ritual. It’s one of the few days I wear a suit, to remind myself that I’m not going into class naked like in my dreams.

Twenty-five years teaching, and in some ways it’s like my first day, when I stood in front of my class in a navy blue suit. One of my students, in a thick Long Island accent, asked “Are you lost?” (It sounded to my midwestern ears as “Awwe yew Lawst?”)

“No, I’m the professor for this class,” I said.

“Ohh, I thought you were a student,” she proclaimed.

The New, Unexpected Year (and where I was wrong yesterday)**

I suspect the reason we need rituals for New Year’s Eve is because possibilities frighten us deep inside.

We know we can survive the daily grind, the status quo. We have survived it up to this point. We’ve even gotten skilled in doing the everyday things, we have done them so often. When faced with the possibility of the unforeseen falling into our lives, we hope the unknowns are positive rather than negative. We hope for the promotion, the agent offer, the lottery win*, or the love interest. We fear illness, death, the recession, and unemployment. Many cultural traditions literally try to tempt Fate by eating lucky foods — black-eyed peas (in Southern US), noodle dishes (in Asia), and pickled herring (Scandinavia). Other cultural traditions have superstitions to attract and keep good luck — making noise on New Years (everywhere), wearing colored underwear (Mexico), making toasts (US, maybe others), and kissing at midnight (US). These customs all have as their basis an attempt to influence the flow of the new year to treat us kindly.

However, seeking out novelty is hardwired into the human brain and make us happy. When we see something new, certain portions of our brain light up and secrete dopamine, which sends us out with an itch (figuratively). If we satisfy that need for something new, our brains reward us. What’s more novel than a new year? This might explain New Years’ parties, where we celebrate, make noise, and make toasts with (usually) alcoholic beverages. The alcoholic beverages also function as a method for relaxing us and toning down our apprehension.

The new year also helps us to recreate ourselves because we’ve been given a clean slate.

Now we come to resolutions. Lanetta, my most faithful reader (and the only one who comments for the most part), suggested yesterday that resolutions are pretty harmless, so I did a little background research this morning. I was wrong about this yesterday.** Dr. John Northrup, psychologist, has found in his research that many more people achieve goals through resolutions than otherwise — 46% vs 4%, by moving us into planning to accomplish the goal (hopefully SMARTly.) The power of the resolution, in fact, is in ritualizing a desire to improve. At any rate, they help us feel like we have control over our future, which does a lot to reduce the apprehension of New Years.

Again, rituals are important to this very day. For the writers out there, rituals help with world-building. For all of us, they help us understand cultures — and ourselves.

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* In actuality, most people who win the lottery spend everything within about 5 years.
** You saw it here. I admitted I was wrong.

New Years rituals. What are yours?

Do any of you have New Years’ rituals (regardless of when you celebrate the new year?)

I’ll share a few of mine. First of all, I do not go out and party New Years’ Eve, even when I was younger and could drink more than one alcoholic beverage a year. I don’t stay up till midnight these days because I turn into a pumpkin after 9 PM. But every year, my husband and I do a silent worship-sharing in the manner of Quakers to tuck the old year in to sleep.

The next day, we eat good luck foods — noodles for long life, pickled herring, black beans and greens (I love Hoppin’ John!), things like that. I think Richard is attempting Japchae, a Korean dish, this year.

I also have a ritual in which I do a little work on everything I want to accomplish this year. So, a little blogging, a little query-writing, a little work, a little play, a little walk, a little writing, a little prepping my seedling room for the winter seed-starting season, a lot of petting cats …

This is a little short today because I’m prepping for classes, which can be nerve-wracking, especially since I need to tweak some classroom material. This means you can respond with your own New Years rituals!

I love you all.

Rituals and word counts.

Thank you for keeping up, friends! I made the 20,000 mark today after swearing to write 3,000 words today despite not feeling well. I had time to write during my lunch hour, so I decided to stay on the goal. Specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic, time-bound.

Honestly, I’m not a horribly organized person who drives toward goals except at NaNo time. I meander most of the year, play with words, set soft goals. NaNo time is different — it’s as NaNo is a ritual I satisfy yearly to belong to my tribe of creatives. It’s like my version of an all-night drumming circle at Midsummer or my First Snow ritual that I no longer hold because nobody’s calendars are clear on that random November night when we get our first inch of snow.

I have to go to class now — don’t tell anyone.

Do you want to read an excerpt tonight? Please let me know!